‘Avengers’ Writers Confirm Shocking Captain America Fan Theory

The following post contains SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame that might possibly make your head hurt from considering all the time travel paradoxes.

Viewers are still debating the implications of Avengers: Endgame’ ending, where Chris Evans’ Captain America travels back into the past to return the Infinity Stones to their rightful places in history, and then goes rogue and decides, “What the hell I’m just gonna live for decades in the past while I’m at it. What’s the worst that could happen? Hey look a butterfly! I’m gonna sit on it!”

The mechanics of Steve Rogers’ life in the past are not explained in the film, but some possible explanations are being provided by the film’s writers and directors (although the two don’t always agree on some of the fine points). In a new interview withThe Hollywood Reporter, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely confirmed one of fans’ biggest theories about the ending: That when Steve Rogers travels into the past he actually becomes Peggy Carter’s mysterious husband, who she mentioned in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Here’s the scene in question. In The Winter Soldier, Steve visits a museum exhibit about Captain America, where he watches a video featuring a post-WWII Peggy talking about her life. Recounting a particularly dangerous mission she notes that Cap “saved over a thousand men, including the man who would become my husband, as it turned out. Even after he died, he was still changing my life.”

According to Markus and McFeely, that husband she’s talking about is post-Endgame Steve Rogers:

Markus and McFeely accept that different people will have different viewpoints on this topic. But, in their minds, Steve was Peggy's husband all along. ‘It was always our intention that he was the father of those two children. But again, there are time travel loopholes for that,’ said McFeely. Added Markus: ‘It does introduce the idea that there are two children who have somewhat super soldier DNA.’

I’m of two minds about this plot twist. On the one hand, it feels very Marvel Comics to have a character live a long time in the past as a reason to possibly introduce two previously unknown Captain America Jrs. down the line. On the other hand, the way Peggy describes her husband here it really doesn’t sound like how she would talk about Cap? I know she’s a great spy, I know she’s supposed to be lying to hide his identity, but it just sounds more like a retcon than something they planned all along. (Then again, “Even after he died he was still changing my life,” is kind of cute in hindsight if this is all true.)

I also don’t understand how this squares with the rules of time travel that Endgame explicitly lays out? If there are two Cap Jrs. out there now, they would have to reside in alternate realities, right? Because you can’t change your past by traveling in time in the MCU. You can only create alternate realities. See? Now my head hurts. I warned you this would happen.